Using KAB 11.1 I am presently making a keyboard (that should go public in a major regional meeting on Saturday, so panic) for Android only.
I am using Keyman Developer 16.0.144 and the keyboard app builds fine. Also packages fine. Same for the lexical model, it builds fine and it packages fine. I will call the language Bobby with code BBB.
Now I use KAB and make an APK. It builds fine and it installs fine on all our project phones, locally. The word suggestions are working as intended. We have a strategic decision to only have long words in our lexical model (five characters or more).
Problem: When typing in any app on the phone like WhatsApp or Signal or just a text-editor, some words receive red-underlines. And I call that behaviour “wrong” for these reasons:
- To me it is undocumented, did not find it anywhere in the manuals.
- In the KAB I never opted for any spell checking.
- In my Keyman app on my phone, I can opt in or out of “corrections”. But my new app from KAB does not give the user any options. Or we cannot find them.
- It is broken in several ways:
– It marks random words in red, because it is not based on any spelling dictionary.
– even some words from the word-suggestions get marked in red.
– If user taps on an underlined word, there is a pop-up menu offering to “add to dictionary” or to “delete”. When user decides to “add” then nothing happens (probably because there is no dictionary for the Bobby language.
– If user is typing a text in Bobby language, and if (for testing) he puts some short English words in, then they are not marked in red! So user is using a purpose-made keyboard for Bobby and the zombie spell checker seems to be working off some English spelling dicco (where from?).
– When I type some almost-English word like “havex”, and I tap on that word which will have red underline, then I see some suggestions for corrections, which look “English” to me, but they are also bad suggestions. It does not even offer “have” as on option but offers stuff like “have x” or “have XD”. - Several team members have looked at this and we all feel that it is somehow “triggered” from the KAB app, not from our respective OSs, because we have never seen such bad spell checking before. (We are all using a previous Android keyboard, built with other tools for the BBB language, and it does not trigger any red underlines, maybe because it does not give any language-tags to the OS?)
So the user experience is totally wrong and is confusing even our internal office team (and they know all about alpha-versions on many tools). It feels that the app should not be released to the public like this.
Hope: My wife claims that she was having a previous test-version from the same project and that no red underlines showed up back then, a few days ago. So maybe I mis-clicked some option in KAB and activated the unwanted spell-checker. If so, please advise. I have searched all over the settings and options last night and could not find anything related.
I searched one more time through the manual, volume “Building Apps” and spell checking is not mentioned at all.
Please help! We want to launch on Saturday. I would not mind some work-around, even a hack; with the idea that “turning something off” is maybe not too involved. I can follow instructions. I have got Android Studio and I have a Hex-editor…